Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions - Content

The Basics

We’re all about startups and new products. Our typical client ranges from a guy in his garage working tirelessly on his new idea to a VP or Director sitting in a corner office trying to refresh her company and break ground with her new product offering. Either way, we work with companies that truly care about their products and don’t bring bureaucracy to the table.

Koombea's Development Team is located at GMT -5. Currently this is 1 hour after EST (East Coast) and 2 hours earlier than PST (West Coast). We work a 40 hour week from 9-5 each day. In some special circumstances we can adjust our schedules.

We are in constant communication with you. During development, we do daily “standup” calls for 15 minutes each day. During design phases we do calls after each deliverable (twice a week). We also do weekly planning meetings which last 1hr approximately. We’re always on Skype or Campfire chat and we’re available by email. We also share our code through GitHub so you can see exactly what we’re coding at any moment.

Our Project Managers always serve as the main point of contact for any client. Unlike many development firms, we offer each of our clients a PM who is there to support you, give you feedback, delegate tasks to the engineers and do anything else necessary to insure your success. Our PMs have all been with Koombea for at least 3 years now. Each of them has managed at least 15 projects. They’re very technical and are excellent coders in their own right.

There’s a rich pool of technical talent in Colombia that’s been untapped until recently. Our first requirement is that engineers have CS degrees from ABET certified universities. Many of our engineers come to Koombea with deep Ruby on Rails knowledge. However, we’ll take a smart developer without Ruby on Rails experience over an average developer with experience any day. We train developers for months and teach them our best practices.

Designers have the requisite Design or HCI (human computer interaction) degrees. Designers must come to us with unique abilities. We look for both skill with graphic design as well as usability.

Front end developers come to us with excellent html/css experience. We train them to become pros with Javascript, Backbone.js, HTML5, CSS3 and other technologies.

In one week we’ll look through 150 applications and interview 1-2 candidates. Of those interviewed, we take less than 20%.

We have an extensive training program which begins with a 2 week “do or die” bootcamp. Those who pass are offered a desk and full time job. Those who do not are asked to reapply at a later date.

After the bootcamp, employees go through a rigorous 2 month training program where they are ramped up to speed on all technologies and tool sets we use. After that, they shadow current projects (with permission from clients) until they are ready to start engaging with clients. At that point, they are considered junior developers.

Training doesn’t stop there. We are constantly holding workshops to keep everyone up to date on the latest tech and trends. Our senior engineers and PMs teach many of the workshops, but we also have professional consultants come as a supplement.

Contact us directly! We’re really competitive and we’ll be happy to do an estimate for you. We work by time and materials, so please note that estimates are not binding quotes. Rather they are ballpark figures that can be narrowed down once we know more about what you want to build.

We use an altered Scrum Agile Development process that we’ve optimized for our team. In short, we run 1 week sprints and iterate as fast as humanly possible. We do daily “standup” calls and weekly planning meetings. At the end of each week we hope to have built a new feature, launch something publicly or accomplished another goal.

We only use 2 tools. We’re that easy. We use Pivotal Tracker to manage development and we use Basecamp to manage design work. Both are incredibly easy to learn, but we’ll still teach them to you anyway.

This depends on the client’s needs and desires. We can offer just Ruby on Rails development, just front end development, just design or any combination/permutation.

Typically we will offer a client a pair of developers and a PM to begin. For the back end we’ll provide a Senior Developer who will lead a Junior developer. Both developers will be managed by one of our PMs who have each managed over 15 projects while with Koombea. The two developers will be dedicated to you and only you. The PM will spend 1/3 of his/her time with you.

On the design side we work by the hour in most cases, but have many projects where a designer is fully dedicated to a client. You’ll most likely need both UI/UX and Graphic Design expertise.

On the front end, we’ll provide a developer with the targeted skill set to accomplish your goals. If you’re looking for great animations, we’ll put one of our CSS3 masters on your project. If you need a Javascript/AJAX wizard, we’ve got them too. And, if you just need some simple slicing and dicing, we’ve got developers who are truly fast and efficient with simple html/css.

We’re able to deploy a single full time developer/designer at the minimum all the way up to a mixed team of 10 or more for large projects.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. We care deeply about solid code that won’t break every time you change a feature. We do TDD and BDD at your request, but can also speed up work if you are not interested. We use such tools at Jenkins, CI-Joe and IntegrityApp for continuous integration. We pair program when problems are difficult. In other situations, engineers will coordinate, but code stories on their own.

Depends on the application... We usually use postgreSQL since we're often deploying on Heroku. We are also comfortable with MySQL. Additionally, we'll use NoSQL db's as needed (Redis, mongo and couch).

We’re strong believers in funnel analysis. We use KISSMetrics quite often, though we are experimenting with MixPanel. We use Optimizely for simple A/B and testing. We use Google analytics for anything else.

More Questions

Yes, we have a variety of partners ranging from resellers to marketing agencies to law firms to incubators to other development firms and so on and so forth. If you think we can work together, please reach out to us at Contact (at) Koombea dot com or initiate a chat through the field on the bottom right corner of this page.

Our CEO, Jonathan, has been a mad scientist slash entrepreneur for ages. He first started out dreaming about building the first commercial flying car and jet pack. After working in Aeronautical engineering for a while in Seattle, he became more obsessed with web and mobile software development. In 2007, at an Apple WWDC event, Jonathan hired a couple developers and took on Koombea’s first startup client: 3Jam (later acquired by Skype). Jon quickly grew his team, expanded to 3 offices and now manages nearly 70 employees.

Do you have more questions?

If you have any other questions, we would be happy to answer them for you.

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